Analysis | Resignation of Julia Schmidt
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Clear the way for a reorganization?
A good year and a half before the next state elections, a battle for people and strategies was raging behind the scenes in Brandenburg’s Alliance Greens. The dispute escalated on Friday evening. And ended with an immediate resignation. By Thomas Bittner
The green state board has withdrawn its own chairperson and unanimously called for their resignation. This doesn’t happen often in parties that govern, appoint ministers, and practice party and coalition discipline. The reason for the demand: “repeated cases of intolerable misconduct.” The Greens, who otherwise rely very much on plain language, are not more specific in a first press release.
Tangible dispute over the top candidacy and strategy
What was unbearable? And what was repeated there? Political connoisseurs are pricked up. Brandenburg’s Greens have repeatedly had to resign over the past few decades. In 2005, a state chairman resigned because of an illegally employed cleaning lady. In 2012, the treasurer of the state association was sentenced to prison for diverting 270,000 euros from the party coffers.
But this time it’s not about such embarrassments and offenses, but rather a real dispute as to who and what strategy the Greens, who have since risen to the ruling party, are going into the 2024 state election campaign with. In the end, Julia Schmidt was alone with her ambitions.
The 29-year-old student had no choice but to comply with the demand for immediate withdrawal. One could not and did not want to wait until the party congress in a few weeks. Not even a joint face-saving press statement was made.
Keller and Baerbock had started from Brandenburg
Julia Schmidt said on Twitter that she was “clearing the way for a reorganization of the state association at the state delegates’ conference in April.” From these dry lines it can be read that she does not see the entire state party well prepared for the conflict in the next election year. That’s what it was about. But: who or what needs to be repositioned? Should the Greens, like the federal party, put people in the spotlight? Should one profile oneself harder against the coalition partners?
She herself does not want to make any further public statements at this time. She first wants to complete her studies, “which has recently become increasingly difficult to achieve alongside her political work,” she writes. Worrying about getting a degree might have been the least of the problems. Rather, the clashes at the top of the co-governing Greens seem to have escalated in the past few weeks, unnoticed by the public.
Julia Schmidt, a political student from Hohen Neuendorf, had always aggressively represented the positions of the Greens in the Kenya coalition. It seemed as if the rise of previous young top women from Brandenburg was repeating itself. Ska Keller, today a European politician, and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also got off to a political start as state chairmen in Brandenburg. Schmidt was repeatedly traded as the top candidate for the 2024 state elections. But obviously not in his own party.
Nobody wants to be quoted
The fact that the Greens are facing a generational change has been openly discussed for some time. Both Environment Minister Axel Vogel and Social Affairs Minister Ursula Nonnemacher, the two most prominent Greens in Brandenburg, made no secret of the fact that they have no ambitions to run again as top candidates. The question of how the smallest of the three Kenya coalition parties would position itself became all the more urgent.
If you ask around the Greens in the hours after their own party leader was kicked out, the interviewees remain strangely tight-lipped. Nobody wants to be quoted, everyone refers to the remaining co-chairman Alexandra Pichl. Pichl tells rbb that Julia Schmidt has been “mainly on her own behalf and not in the interest of the state association” in the last few weeks and months. She bypassed committees and “made false statements”. I guess that means she lied. You don’t learn more that she “doesn’t want to wash any dirty laundry in the interests of the state association and in the interests of Ms. Schmidt”.
A candidacy that no one has offered her
Julia Schmidt writes: “I have personally decided not to be available as a top candidate.” That seems to be the core of the argument. Because Schmidt writes about a candidacy that no one has officially offered her so far.
The profiling of a rather lonely acting top woman or a top man was always suspicious of the party friends of the Greens, who were oriented towards grassroots democracy and had been acting extra-parliamentarily in Brandenburg for decades.
Now, however, the personnel issue is moving into the limelight. Who is going into the election year with which plan? The state delegates’ conference at the end of April must find answers.
Broadcast: rbb24, February 18, 2023, 9:45 p.m